This binding integrates the Oceanic water softener and management system (www.oceanic.be, but also distributed by Syr in Germany (www.syr.de)).
The binding supports the Limex IQ and Limex Pro water softeners and require the optional CAN-Serial gateway has to be installed

For example, On Ubuntu 17.10 nrjavaserial seems to return only HEX 00 characters through the InputStream of the SerialPort.

Within the Oceanic binding two routes are provided:

Connect to the Oceanic softener over a serial port that is outside the scope of the Java Virtual Machine, setup a TCP "proxy" on the host that is connected to the softener, and make openHAB connect to that proxy over a plain TCP connection. This can be achieved with socat:

/usr/bin/socat -v TCP-LISTEN:9000 /dev/ttyUSB0,raw,echo=0

In the above example, the name of the host running socat, and the TCP port number 9000, will be part of the network Thing configuration

Connect to the Oceanic softener over a serial port on the openHAB host and use socat to pipe the data from that serial port to a pseudo tty, which has to be manipulated in a CommPortIdentifier.PORT_RAW manner.

However, in order to fix permissions at the OS level, one has to issue following commands in order to make /dev/ttyS1 accessible by the 'openhab' system user (that is used to start up the openHAB runtime), and to make the tty both readable and writable.